With the development of Internet and storage technologies, it becomes an irresistible trend to provide network storage space to Internet users and provide a new information exchanging method based on the storage space. The local disk space and data volume of a user are also increasing rapidly. Therefore, the sharing of content between users is frequent in either the local area network or the network storage space.
In a prior art, access to a shared file is related to the absolute path of the shared file in its local file system. Currently, the search of files in a file system is based on the absolute path such as /D0/F00 of the files. By using the directory name or the file name as the search object, the search begins from the root directory along the directory tree until the related physical file is located. Under the preceding physical file search mechanism, once the absolute path of a shared file is changed, the access of a shared file receiver to the shared file will fail.
For example, a Windows file system does not allow moving or renaming of a shared directory or its parent directory. The moving or renaming operation will cause the sharing relation of the directory to be cancelled.
In a Linux system, when directories are shared over the Network File System (NFS) protocol, the same problem also exists. For example, the directories of machine B are listed in the Linux system on machine A, and when machine B changes the name of a shared directory or moves the shared directory to another directory, machine A will no longer be able to access the original directory.
During the implementation of the present invention, the inventor finds that the prior art has at least the following weakness:
In the current file system, the maintenance of sharing relations and the organization of file directories are mixed up. When the organization of a file directory or the name of a file or directory is changed, the existing sharing relation is affected. Consequently, management is difficult for the user of the file system.